I haven’t been blogging much lately, and I wanted to apologize and let you all know what’s going on with me lately.  Lots of stuff has been going on actually, which is good and bad.  I like being busy, so that’s a good thing, but you know sometimes you just try to do too much stuff and then the stress kicks in and that’s not fun.

Anyway, here’s the rundown:

TechMentor

I’m presenting three sessions at TechMentor Orlando, and I’m excited about it.  I hope some of you happen to come down to the show this June, it should be a lot of fun.  I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my sessions ready and I hope that all goes well.  Here are the session names:

• W15 VMware ESXi for the Small Business and Smart IT Pro 
• W19 Automating VMware Management with Windows PowerShell
• TH8 Automate Hyper-V with PowerShell and Virtual Machine Manager

TechEd

You may know that as Director of PowerShellCommunity.org, I was sent to TechEd lsat week in Los Angeles. Steve Murawski and I spent our time alternating between staffing Microsoft’s management technologies booth, attending breakout sessions (and occasionally participating in them), meeting with PoshComm sponsors, meeting with prospective sponsors on the show floor, and just networking with other cool geeks who like PowerShell. If you use Facebook, check out the photos I tagged and captioned that Ibrahim (from the PowerShell team) took while at the show.

And there’s more! I was busy at the show…

I interviewed the one and only Mark Minasi for TechEd Online.  I don’t think it’s  been posted online yet, but when it is, I’ll be sure to give you all a link.  The guy is great to talk to and a hell of a speaker as most of you know already.  I had a lot of fun with the interview. In fact, it was funny because the lady coordinating the video shoot said to aim for 2-3 minutes, and Mark and I turned to look at each other and I knew he was thinking the exact same thing I was.  “This lady is crazy, let’s talk for as long as we want to.” 

I also interviewed Kirk Munro of PowerGUI fame, also for TechEd Online, but I think a different group.  This was a neat overview of what Kirk does.  Dmitry did a great write-up which you can find here.

One evening, I had the distinct honor of being interviewed by Scott Hanselman on his Hanselminutes podcast.  I knew that Scott’s show leaned heavy to the dev side, so I dragged Kirk along with me.  You can listen to us on show #162 PowerShell 2.0.

Let’s see what else…I had a book signing, got to meet a few people there.  I attended Don Jones’ PowerShell top 10 tips session, and we walked together to the bookstore and hung out while he was signing his own book.  I actually signed more copies of my book during his signing than my own.  Thanks, Don!

Last, but not least, my birds-of-a-feather session turned out great.  We had between 20 and 30 people, and it was a very interactive audience for which I was thankful.  Steve also helped out a lot during the talk.

Whew! Enough typing for now.  I need to get some more scripts posted up here.  I think that’ll start back up again now that I’ve got a new job and all that. (P.S. for those who may have missed it, I’m now at Home Depot on the Enterprise Monitoring team.)

I haven’t written any non-PowerShell posts lately, as some may have noticed.  The weather is great today, and I’m home working on my book, and before I got into it I thought I’d spend a few paragraphs sharing some things I’ve been playing with lately.

Live Mesh

Available at mesh.com, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s sync platform which they seem to have a lot of great plans for. We’ll see. In the meantime, the desktop client makes a solid folder sync / p2p app so I’ve been using it for a while to sync my PowerShell profile across multiple machines. Just this past week at PDC, Microsoft released a new version of the client (ooh and added some videos), and has added a Windows Mobile app as well.  I’m underwhelmed so far, but I’m actually still interested so will continue to play with it. In particular, I’m a bit inspired by what Dale Lane is doing with it on his eighty-million devices.

Wakoopa

I just found this social network site Wakoopa which tracks what software you use and—not sure what else yet. I saw it linked on Dale’s blog, so thanks twice over, buddy.  As most of you know, I’m a hardcore software junkie, so this is right down my alley-wick, to mix a metaphor.  I’ve just started setting up a profile, we’ll see if I remain interested in it.

StackOverflow

I setup a profile on StackOverflow when it was still in closed beta, and I’ve been visiting the site pretty regularly ever since. It’s a Q&A site, somewhat like Expert Exchange, but it’s very lightweight  in feel, yet heavy on the web 2.0 GUI stuff, which I like. The site is aimed (heavily) towards developers, but I’m finding that PowerShell is fitting pretty well so that works for me.

New Toys?

I’m thinking of getting two toys for Christmas (they’ll really be sort of for/from my wife and vice versa, not sure who will get more time on which):

• Chumby – a cute little net-enabled streaming music box with widgets and alarm clock features
• iPod Touch – well, everyone knows what these are

Music

As always, you can find the music I’ve been listening to lately on Last.FM. Some notables:

• New and old Metallica
• Irish & Celtic music (thanks Oisin!)
• and a ton of other stuff

I haven’t written anything of substance lately (and I won’t end that pattern with this post ). I think its due to lack of sleep and just being really busy at work lately. I’m on vacation this week so maybe I’ll correct the sleep part.

In the meantime I just wanted to share with you my latest Nigerian spam. I just can’t get enough of these guys. I’m glad to know that I can trust this fellow as he says he has INTEGRITY.

Hi honey. Her name is Staci. She’s a hot mama.

Congratulations to Nathan and Athena aka Fritzy and Rainshine. Their baby boy was delivered today around 1045 MST. He told me the length and weight but I forgot what it was.

For those unaware, Nathan is the man behind Edgar the Jabber bot and class.jabber.php.

This is way off topic for me, but let’s consider this a public service announcement.

Please view exhibits A and B:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Entirely by accident, I was able to enter Atlanta Airpoirt, the business airport in the world, with these two knives in my carry-on baggage. I walked through the security line, had my stuff X-rayed, took my shoes off like everyone else, then took my bag and got on the plane.

I did not even know they were in my bag until my return flight where the security people did do their job. They did the X-ray, then someone said, “I need a bag check”. A supervisor came over, checked the screen, and I was pulled aside. When the guard went through the bag by hand and found the knives I was all kinds of worried. For one, I didn’t want to get some strip search treatment, unless maybe the guard was kinda cute. But the main reason was that the Gerber Multi-tool was a Christmas present and I didn’t want to give it up!

It turned out the guard was cool though. He just walked me back out of the secured area back to the ticketing area. I was then able to check my bag with knives intact and everything was present and accounted for when I picked up my stuff at baggage claim. Big relief for several reasons since I don’t trust the baggage handlers. But that’s another story.

(For the record I use Exhibit B all the time, Exhibit A much less so.)

Spent a miserable nite last night banging my head against a wall.

Got new mobo installed with my old CPU. I was able to boot all the way into a linux install I was working on before the mobo swap for the first time, which was a good indicator for me. But the install was corrupted before, so obviously I was going to re-do it from scratch anyway. And I decided to do Windows first anyway. So I wiped the HD from a 3rd party fdisk util (from the Ultimate Boot Disk, good stuff, google it) and was gonna boot to CD and install Windows.

It wouldn’t boot. I wrestled with that one for an hour or so before disconnecting my SATA drive, which is connected to a PCI SATA adapter since my mobo lacks that capability. CDs will boot now. Ok, go to Windows setup. Hit enter to begin setup, bam STOP 0x8E. From 8pp-11pm I worked on that and never figured it out. Only remaining things to try are remove the SATA adapter entirely, same for firewire (both of these had been in my computer for a year), and other hardware measures like new RAM. Microsoft says 0x8E can be caused by bad RAM, but I think its unlikely that both RAM chips are bad because that would mean that my old mobo AND RAM were bad, AND the RAM failures don’t show up on an extensive RAM diag util running overnight. (I did try installing one stick then the other individually.)

This shouldn’t be that hard! And I am extremely curious to know if a new Kubuntu Linux install would succeed…

### Update July 23rd ###
Jeez. Finally got my PC back up. It’s been up now for about 5 days. The main culprit was that my Western Digital 160 GB SATA drive was going bad, and nothing worked right with the drive plugged in. The other difficulty was that I couldn’t install Windows to my new 250 GB SATA RAID 1 array without installing a driver from a floppy disk. Floppy disk? I have 3 computers in my house and no floppy drives! Had to buy one, but never got the process right so I skipped it by installing to my 40 GB PATA drive. I might ghost it over later.

Just deleted 40 comments from the moderation queue. Did the same yesterday. I don’t understand who these scum think they are fooling.

U’ve got good pics, the site could use a tiny bit of work (no offense) its still awesome

???

For some reason I still haven’t upgraded to WordPress 1.5.x. It won’t take long, and it has more comment spam blocking features. Plus the newest plugins won’t work with 1.3 anyways.

Haven’t written much lately. Work’s kept me very busy, very busy. General thoughts follow in random order:

* Tried out the new Microsoft “Codenamed Acrylic Beta” (it’s a beta, and did they mention that Acrylic is the code name?) I found the interface a step backwards, inconsistent, core features missing, and more complaints. It’s a Adobe Illustrator knock-off, but I hear Microsoft bought it off of somebody (duh) and…what? They can’t complete unless they charge $20, or include it in the OS–which I would say is a mistake.
* Thought of writing a new Jabber Idea post based on server-side message storage accessible via IMAP, but I couldn’t really add enough value to the concept to make it worth my time. So…consider this paragraph my idea.
* Stumbled upon Infrastructure.org today (thx Nolan). I feverishly read page after page (scanning past the unixy details I didn’t care to read). Stunning. I have decided Monday (workload willing) that I will begin work on my own version. It will be Windows-centric of course, since that’s what I do. But! But, it will be exclusively open-source or freeware biased. I’ll include concepts and utilities that are included in the OS, but I think I might end up skipping some MSFT technologies for which I don’t care (or for that matter, wish to learn), and instead search for an F/OSS alternative. The end result might turn into its own website, as infra.org did, who knows.
* No motivation this weekend, didn’t get anything much useful done. One productive thing I did was migrate from my old circa 1990 Sony AV receiver to a used Yamaha I got off of a friend that lo and behold, knows what a DVD player is, and can speak the Dolby Pro-Logic tongue. Amen! (Damn, I’m cheap.)

byebye. too lazy to link the interesting things above, you’ll have to google.

Make fun of me. I’m getting a Gamecube (used ebay) for my birthday. it’s from the boys. figured it would be a gift they could understand and appreciate.

Thought of the superior Xbox of course, or even waiting for the new systems we’ll hear about in the upcoming E3. But some of you are well aware of how cheap I am. plus the auction does come with some cool games.

Ok 2nd thing to make fun of me about: my TV has died. It was 15 or 17 years old. It’s technically not dead really, but past the point at which I care to use it. The front panel controls died long ago. Well last night the remote control input stopped working. It’s a blind/deaf/mute TV now. Kinda like the guy in the Metallica – One music video. Except its a TV.

I’m sure the innards are working otherwise.

So…i’ll be looking over the Crutchfield catalog for ideas. Pray with me that I can be strong and get an HD-ready set. This is usually where I would wimp out and replace my 27″ with another 27″. Maybe even cable-ready.

Great. I just found out that my RSS feed has been broken for a few weeks. I have no idea what’s wrong with it yet.

This is just a test. I moved to a new server…so far so good!

Yesterday in a meeting I did something fun and pointless (which made it more fun!). Using my now mostly trusty hp iPaq 4150, I connected a terminal services session using the Pocket PC RDP client to my laptop over wifi. Then, I ran conf.exe and joined my boss’s Netmeeting conference–now in progress. He looks over at me funny but says nothing. A few minutes later he is sharing his Powerpoint presentation to everyone at 1024 x 768 rez. Then I show off to everyone his presentation on my little 320×240 screen. It was kinda funny. I can see about two words before I have to scroll. Quite useless! But it got a laugh out of everyone, which I guess was the point.

During the meeting I put the iPaq down and it powered off after a couple of minutes of inactivity. I tried to reconnect to my laptop but it failed. When I got back to my desk after the meeting I found that my laptop was totally hung. Had to reset the bastard. It’s ok, it was worth it.

This makes blogging from my pda much faster. Still takes a little getting used to though. I like it, however, HP decided to put many non-English characters on here, meaning there are 14 meta-keys I will never use. wööt! ¡Voy al baño, séñor! I don’t even know what a “ß” is.

(I’m writing this from my iPaq, and that is pretty geeky. A little slow, but geeky.)

I achieved two geeky milestones this weekend. The first is that I installed Anapod on my PC. No, it gets better! I wrote about Anapod a week ago or so. It is a sync tool that can replace iTunes for music management of an iPod. It does not have a store, like iTunes, but for someone like me who already has a fair-sized library, you get what you need, plus some pretty cool extras. One of those extras (here comes the geeky part) is a built-in streaming audio server. So obviously, I just *had* to listen to the music on my iPod wirelessly over wifi from my HP h4155 iPaq. Pretty pointless, yet somehow satisfying!

Geek event #2:

You know those cheap plastic helicopter toys that fly 20 feet high or so after you pull on a string-wrapped axle? Well the neighbor kid had one which his dad promptly broke after two pulls. Not to be discouraged, we took the launcher apart to get at the axle. A bit of hacksawing produced a small mandrell that, once a screw was inserted, fit *perfectly* into the chuck of my Dremel tool! After a couple of practice runs, I had it flying pretty well. When next at my computer, I’ll upload some pics and a short video.

Media: (the guy in these is my neighbor Steve)
“>

Videos: low-quality (322k avi) / high-quality (1.38mb avi) [Windows Media Player 9 required, sorry if you don't have that, I'm playing with codecs so bear with me.]

[4/11/04 11:34pm edit: added hyperlinks and photos & stuff]

I got a call Friday (actually earlier, but we played phone tag for a few days) from a lady at Apple. She was from the Executive Customer Relations department. She was nice, but did not offer to do anything for me out of the ordinary aside from act as liason to the technical support and repair departments. But by this time I had already sent the DOA re-replacement back once more and it was in Atlanta by Friday (arrived at my house that evening). I asked “what can you do to make it up to me”. Took many minutes, and much demurrals on her part, but I eventually got her to agree to some concessions on Apple’s part.

They are sending to me the iPod Remote & Earphones and the XtremeMac iPod Case Black. Total retail price = $60. That’s what I paid for the extended warranty, so that works out pretty well. I still wish they gave me a new iPod to reset the warranty date, but I’m still out ahead for what I have. Wish it did not take three weeks and hours of phone calls.

I have just about had it with Apple. I wrote about some problems I’d had with my iPod a bit ago. Well the troubles keep going. I received a new (actually brand-new, not a refurb) unit in the mail in short order, once I finally completed the musical boxes routine. Guess what? It was DOA. I sent that unit back for repair, and they sent the same unit back–unrepaired.

Today I sent this (42k pdf) letter addressed to Steve Jobs via Priority Mail. I wrote “Hal Rottenberg, a customer” on the return label. I’m hoping that plus the letter-sized priority mail envelope will get attention. Who knows.

In the meantime, I’ve begun the process yet again to get the iPod repaired. I’m becoming quite familiar with the process. If anyone has questions about the return and warranty policies, let me know–I’m an expert.

I feel like I’ve just been pressured by a couple of large Italian thugs to pay their protection racket money. (Note: I am an equal opportunity offender–they could be Cuban, Japanese, Mexican or whatever–it’s not important. )

Anyway, I’ve got an iPod and I love it. I use it on average about 5 hours a day during the week. Mostly while I’m sittng at my desk at work, and often for the morning drive. Battery life is for the most part not much of an issue for me since it’s plugged into the wall at work. But now it’s getting ridiculous. The rumors and stories are true, these batteries they put in the iPod are CRAP. I’ve had it since somewhere around July of last year and now instead of the rated 8-10 hours life i get somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours. Once or twice after charging all night the battery has been dead.

I finally got fed up and called Apple. There is a one-year warranty so I figured I’d pay $5 or so to ship the unit to them, and within a few days they’d ship me a refurb back ground (on their dime) and I’d have a working device within two weeks. No. What happens is you put in a request and they overnight you a “special box”. Whatever. Return shipping is overnight–their dime. Then when you get the refurb unit, it’s also overnighted. This is cool, right? Well, within the first 6 months of ownership, it is cool. After that they charge you $31.99! Now remember, I could’ve paid any other company $5 for admittedly a lower level of service on the turnaround time, but I’m a cheap guy so I’d have done that anyway. Not an option though. It’s $31.99 now or $99 later (when the unit is out of warranty). Bastards!

I thought about it though and since I do get so much use out of this thing, it was worth paying the fee. Then when I got on the phone the guy offers the Applecare plan to me. It’s a $59 extended warranty that lasts two years–from the purchase date of the wearranty, not the unit. Under this plan you don’t pay the $31.99 rape fee and I figure that in another 12-18 months the battery is gonna die again anyway so it did make sense to get the plan. Normally I’m very much against extended warrantees though–and I’m still not quite comfortable with this one.

I swear man, I love the product but Apple just squeezes and squeezes ya. Did I mention that a tech support call costs $49 and a typical out-of-warranty repair order is $200? They sure are pretty vain over there in Jobsland.

Here’s round 1, a random sampling of the 700 digital pictures we took while at Disney last week. (That doesn’t include the 4 or 5 rolls of 35mm!)

Enjoy.

http://gallery.halr9000.com/disney2004

Ok, the family is back from a full week at Disney. And I mean full. I’m retouching photos now (the first batch will be 273 photos!), and once I upload some I’ll write up a blog on the trip.